10 000 000 Dollars Bearer Cheque

By the time this bearer cheque entered circulation in mid-2008, Zimbabwe's monthly inflation rate had already exceeded 11 million percent. The Reserve Bank pivoted to bearer cheques — technically short-term financial instruments rather than banknotes — partly as a legal mechanism to sidestep statutory limits on note issuance, and partly to allow denominations to scale faster than the printing cycle for conventional currency could accommodate.

Fidelity Printers and Refiners, a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank itself, produced the entire hyperinflationary bearer cheque series domestically. The security profile is minimal — a basic watermark — which reflects both the speed of production demands and the irrelevance of counterfeiting deterrence when a note's face value collapsed within days of issue.

The ten-million-dollar denomination was obsolete almost immediately, superseded within weeks by hundred-billion-dollar issues in the same series.